


Hanahaki

by selwyn



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-17 08:24:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17556803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selwyn/pseuds/selwyn
Summary: [An illness born from unrequited love. The person’s throat will fill up with flowers until they cough them up. The only way to cure it is if the love is returned, or to cut out the flowers out. This will also remove the feelings.]Madara was twenty-eight years old and two months fresh from peace when he coughed up his first rose. It crawled out of his mouth, the thorns pricking his tongue and drawing blood, and he had to leave immediately.





	1. Chapter 1

_An illness born from unrequited love. The person’s throat will fill up with flowers until they cough them up. The only way to cure it is if the love is returned, or to cut out the flowers out. This will also remove the feelings._

 

Madara was twenty-eight years old and two months fresh from peace when he coughed up his first rose. It crawled out of his mouth, the thorns pricking his tongue and drawing blood, and he had to leave immediately. Inuzuka Ashi, who he’d been talking to, made a noise of offense when he stood up, but Madara paid her no mind as he fled.

Once he was alone, he pulled the rose out and tore it apart. The thorns stabbed through his gloves but he didn’t care – he shredded it until it was nothing but green pulp and flecks of red.

When he came back to Ashi, she was considerably colder, but he was in no state of mind to care. He couldn’t stop thinking about that rose, about the blood still in his mouth.

 

_⋯_

 

Hashirama invited him to dinner. Madara accepted.

It was a mistake.

He fought the urge all through dinner, as if sheer stubbornness would keep the flowers at bay. But their petals tickled his throat and he felt them blooming inside him, unstoppable in their growth, and he excused himself so he could gag in the bathroom.

Four lilies spilled from his mouth, with snowy white petals and delicate green stems. Madara angrily yanked them out of the sink and flushed them down the toilet. His mouth ached and burned the entire time; when Hashirama asked him if he didn’t like the food, he simply shook his head and continued to pick at his plate.

When he got home, he discovered that his tongue was swollen. Whatever those flowers were, they’d been toxic.

 

_⋯_

 

The third time, he had no place to hide. In the office, he cut himself off in the middle of a lecture with a harsh, rattling cough that made Hashirama straighten in alarm. “Madara –!"

"I’m fine, leave it –” he contradicted himself with another cough that scratched his ribs on the way out. Tiny petals scattered from his lips and onto his lap. Madara felt his face growing hot. He didn’t know which was choking him more – the petals or the mortification.

He bent over, ignoring Hashirama coming to him, and coughed until a red chrysanthemum dropped into his cupped hand. Another followed it, equally red, and Madara wanted to die.

“…oh,” Hashirama breathed next to his ear. He put his hand on his shoulder.

Madara twitched back, crushing the flowers. “This doesn’t concern you,” he snapped. He had no other place to put the flowers, so he shoved them into his pocket. “Get back to what you were doing, Hashirama. The food surplus for winter –"

"I feel them growing inside you,” Hashirama said, and there was a strange unreadability to his tone.

Madara chose to see it as pity, and he bristled. “If all you want to do is waste my time, then I’ll leave,” he growled, standing. He felt more flowers unfolding in the dark spaces of his chest, their blooms tickling the base of his throat, and it was too much, all of it overwhelming. He yanked himself free of Hashirama. “Don’t mention this to anyone,” he warned him, his eyes narrowed.

“Madara,” Hashirama began, his hands spread out in a gesture of peace, “please, don’t –”

“This doesn’t _concern_ you!” Madara almost shouted, holding the flowers so tightly that he felt his hand grow damp from the squashed chrysanthemums. “Leave it. Now.”

He stormed out of there, his steps thundering, trailing bruised petals on his way out. At home, he coughed and coughed until his floor was a bouquet of red chrysanthemums, and he burned them all.

 

_⋯_

 

“You should tell them,” Hashirama said later, two weeks after the incident in his office. He sat in Madara’s home in the Uchiha compound, his expression so determinedly amicable that Madara wanted to cut his smile off.

“There is nothing to say,” Madara rumbled, scowling. He’d let Hashirama in because he’d thought this would be a village matter. Clearly, it wasn’t.

“Madara, it’s the most easily treated disease in existence, all you need to do is –”

“It’s so simple, is it?” he sneered, his grip on his cup tightening. “You’re so juvenile, Hashirama –”

“I don’t understand why you’re so determined to suffer –”

“It’s not your _place_ to understand!” Madara hissed at him. He stood up but there was no place to retreat to this time. He turned around and walked into his garden, trying to banish Hashirama’s damnably earnest face from his memory. Why did he have to _try_ so hard? Why couldn’t he ever just learn to stop, to give up, to _leave things alone_?

“I don’t want to see you in pain,” Hashirama said from behind him and Madara almost screamed. Hashirama was insufferable, he was awful, he was everything that he hated, because he never gave up, he never stopped, he just kept coming with his fucking peace and his fucking kindness and Madara wanted to claw him out, _out_.

He heaved. The flowers came up thickly this time, yellow and gold, and they sprouted uncontrollably until he gagged them out, stems and all. It was honeysuckle this time. Madara stepped on them, grounding down, until he felt Hashirama gently grab his shoulders.

He froze.

“Being loved by you is an honor,” he said. “You don’t need to hide it like this. Whoever it is, I’m sure they’d reciprocate it.”

The ugly, blooming sensation he associated with the sickness curled through him again. Hashirama didn’t move. The heat of his hands burned through his clothes, through his skin, and Madara breathed hard, shaking, staring at the pile of broken flowers under his feet.

_Being loved by you is an honor._

He was going to burst into flames, he could feel it. His chakra was surging through him like a forest fire and his heart was squeezing, contracting so hard that he was sure it would split open right there.

“…you don’t know anything,” he said, his voice ragged. “You don’t understand anything. I’m not going to explain it to you. Just… just go. Leave me.”

After a long silence, Hashirama finally sighed and acquiesced. Madara listened to his fading footsteps, burning, shaking, dying.


	2. Chapter 2

_Love was the most dangerous emotion humanity could feel. Love drove men mad before it ate them alive._

 

Madara was fifteen years old when he watched his uncle die from suffocation. It was a slow death, stretched over a thousand minutes. Kazuma had been incredible once but when his time was up, he was already dead in every way but physically.

Flower petals continued to fall out when they strapped him to his pyre. They were soft and crumpled by the lax pressure of his cold mouth, but they were still vibrant, scattered on the ground like letters never sent. His father stepped on them without a second glance, his eyes on his brother’s corpse, but Madara watched the petals, riotous pink and deep fuchsia, get crushed underfoot. By the time Kazuma’s spirit was released, the petals were gone, churned into the mud by too many feet.

“This is what happens,” he heard some of his kinsmen say later, “when you aren’t careful.”

For the longest time, he didn’t know what being careful was until his cousin, Uzume, was struck by the same illness. One day after battle, they were tiredly strapping off their armor, sluggishly helping each other undo straps and pull off buckles, when she coughed next to him and spat out four tiny petals.

There was a scandalous silence after that. Heads turned and stared. Madara watched Uzume go white and run, still wearing half her armor, until she disappeared around the tents.

Unlike Kazuma, Uzume didn’t die. She just… came back, with new stitches above her belly and death in her eyes. She never coughed up a single petal again.

It took Madara five more years to understand the true meanings of these moments. He was in the grips of his feral twenties, all fresh tendons and ripe strength, and every emotion he felt was a hurricane in his chest. They said that the sickness of the flowers was what happened when your emotions took physical form. When your heart grew too full and the secrets spilled over, they grew as flowers inside the fertile soil of your secrets. After that, they could only come out.

Their clan wasn’t the only one who suffered this sentiment’s plague. But, in a way, they were the ones who felt its price most keenly.

 

_⋯_

 

_Some people will tell you that love is an endless, ever-growing thing, that it’s some eternal fountain that will always give and give. But they are wrong. Love is not air. Love is love, and it needs space. Take it out, and a hole will be left behind._

Some of his kin avoided the disease by being open with their affections. It couldn’t take root if the soil was thin was the reasoning, and so some Uchiha came to use their words like heavy knives, cutting through the stems of these treacherous, choking feelings. Others avoided sentiment entirely, because what had no seed would never grow. These tactics worked in their own ways. And yet.

Humans were the only animals whose greatest predator was the self.

Madara thought he was safe. While his peers coughed fragrant jasmine and gorged up buds of lily, he kept his eyes down. His heart felt no tugging strings because he was its gardener and whatever grew inside, he tore it out by the roots. He truly, genuinely, thought he was safe.

 

_⋯_

 

_The stupid man may burn himself, but only the blind man walks into the fire._

Madara was still picking leaves from his teeth when he walked into Hashirama’s office. It was late – the place was nearly empty – but civil administration didn’t understand time outside of working days.

 _Working days._ He was using these words now, adopted them from the soft creatures of the capital.

He tore out another spiny bit of leaf and threw it away, slamming open Hashirama’s door as he did so. Hashirama jerked upright but it was too late – Madara had caught him red-handed in the middle of a stolen nap.

“Are you done with the clearance requests?” he asked bluntly, unfazed by Hashirama’ soft blinking and the indents on his cheek from where he’d rested it on his sleeve. “I told you we need them by tomorrow morning.”

“…I’m almost done,” Hashirama said. He had the decency to look sheepish. He was also still half-asleep, his mouth parted, as gentle as the sunset in spring. It was this way of his, this gentle, unassuming form he wore, that it made it hard to remember he killed as many men as Madara had.

Madara bit back his unkind retort and strode over. Hashirama wasn’t lying at least – mostly everything was done, the scrolls stamped and signed with the Hokage’ approval, but there were still a few left undone. Madara plucked these up.

“This is stupid,” he declared a few moments later, tossing it into the reject’s pile. The next one he did the same to. By the time he was done, he had four requests that would be sent back to their writers. “Where are the other rejections? I’ll get one of the chuunin to send them back.”

Hashirama, who’d been watching him tear through the requests, scratched the back of his neck. “Ah… there are no rejects. Beside the ones you just did, I mean.”

“What?” Madara looked at the approved pile. Now that he was actually examining it, it seemed a little too hefty for his liking. “No. Not all of these can be actually critical.”

“Well, people want their space and –“

“This isn’t about what people _want_ ,” Madara sneered, already snatching up the first approved request. “These first requests need to be dedicated to only clan-critical infrastructure, not vanity land – look at this! The Hideki clan made a request for ‘space required for tranquility’. _Tranquility_.”

He pushed his nail into the wax seal on the scroll and cracked it off. “That is _not_ critical to anything.”

“Madara…” Hashirama said, but he was quiet when Madara glanced at him. He continued to be quiet when Madara ripped through the rest of the pile, muttering unsavory comments under his breath at the audacity. _The Shimura want private training grounds – feh!_

By the time he was done, the actually approved pile was much smaller than the rejects. Madara began writing halfway through, noting his reasons for rejection.

 _These requests need to be critical to infrastructure,_ he wrote down, his characters sharp with impatience, _secondary requests regarding personal desires can come **after** the village is actually formed._

It wasn’t as diplomatically put as Hashirama could have done, he thought as he began to arrange the piles for tomorrow, but sometimes, you just had to stop beating around the bush and tell people where the line was. If they really thought that Hashirama’s pleasant attitude translated into tolerance for this kind of –

Madara stopped halfway through a sentence. His skin prickled and he snapped his head towards Hashirama. “What?”

He caught the look Hashirama was giving him and his heart chose that moment to do flips. Hashirama… he looked tired, because of course he was, creating a village out of a disparate handful of clans was a monumental task, but he also looked…

 _Gentle,_ a soft voice inside Madara supplied. Gentle was a good word for it, because Hashirama was still in his long Hokage robes, now rumpled by sleep, and the soft light of the lanterns he’d been working by made him glow like dark gold. Their light reflected in his eyes and Hashirama was smiling in a way that made it impossible to think.

“What?” Madara snapped again. He felt out of breath. Punched stupid.

“Nothing,” Hashirama said. His smile quirked up higher, the one dimple on his right cheek becoming more pronounced, and oh, fucking _damn_ it, Madara felt like he was losing his mind. “I was just thinking about how you’re still more suited to being Hokage than I am.”

Nothing in the room changed, but Madara could have sworn it was getting hotter. Or was it just him?

“The people chose you,” he pointed out, too aware of how still he was. He must have looked like an idiot, sitting there with a wet brush in his hands, bent over the desk, doing work that wasn’t even his responsibility.

“But I wanted to choose you,” Hashirama replied. He propped his elbow up on the desk, putting his head on both his hands like he was a child. Madara watched his hair slide over his shoulders, his fingers going numb with the trembling urge to touch it. Wrap his hand up in it. “People just… don’t know you like I do.”

“I wasn’t that great of a choice anyway –“ Madara began, not even knowing why he was trying to deflect Hashirama’s sincerity. Probably because he might spontaneously combust if he let himself believe Hashirama really meant everything he said.

“You were the best choice,” Hashirama shrugged and Madara opened his mouth to instinctively counter him when he felt something bloom inside his throat.

He clamped his mouth shut so quickly that his teeth clicked. He straightened suddenly, his chest constricting, and he shoved his notes over, ignoring the smears of ink on his hands. “Well, it’s your position now,” he said roughly, feeling the flowers growing wildly, threatening to pour out of his mouth at any second. “So you need to actually do it properly.”

It came out sharper than he meant it. He wanted to say _I’m doing this because I want to help you, because this is our dream, because these snakes will take advantage of your kindness,_ but it was too late for any of that. He needed to leave. He needed to leave _now._

“I’ve written down why those requests were rejected. Someone else can write it down properly for you later. I’m done here.”

All his words were sharp now, glistening knives falling out of careless lips, but Madara didn’t have time to see if they were drawing blood. He left before Hashirama could say anything, his hair flying wildly behind him, his steps thundering in the empty building.

Madara made it down two hallways before he knelt down and coughed. It came from deep inside his chest, the noise echoing. He reached into his mouth and snagged the tip of the bloom – used it to reel the rest out. Through the corner of his eye, he saw frothy pale blue that deepened into a violet blush, and the wisteria continued to grow and grow as he heaved it free.

 

_⋯_

 

_Love is not gentle. It doesn’t care who it pricks with its arrow._

A shinobi was one who endured. The Uchiha clan didn’t do anything else but endure. Seventeen years old and growing, Madara watched his clan slowly starve. They were poor – they used up all their armor until they cracked off their backs and their weapons were spotted with rust. Food was equally scarce – lean bodies grew leaner and their mantles swallowed them up. They were all animals now, on their hands and knees, only thinking between one mouthful and the next.

Those starving years taught Madara a few things about hunger, of gaping dark mouths and wild-eyed desperation. So he recognized the way hunger migrated from his stomach to his heart, and how it made him greedy. He wanted to stuff himself with Hashirama’s presence. He wanted to gorge on his company and swallow his words; he wanted to devour him until he was finally full.

But this is a meal he could – dared not – touch. So Madara continued to starve, choked by avarice. He would rather die with his heart filled to bursting than confess anything. Hashirama didn’t feel the same way, he was sure of it, and having his pity would be the worst thing in the world. If his silence meant that he had to suffocate, then so be it.

Still. Sometimes, Madara tortured himself with thoughts of reciprocation. At his lowest, he stitched together fantasies of confessing and Hashirama smiling at him and saying, _yes, I want you too._ It was despicable; he always loathed himself after the heat of the fantasy cooled off into sweat and he had nothing to show for it but an empty bed and sticky hands.

Maybe if he were ten years younger, he would have seriously entertained the possibility of asking for more out of their friendship. But he was twenty-eight now, and feeling even older after everything he’d lost. He didn’t want to upset the fragile equilibrium just to have rejection thrown back. He didn’t want pity to taint what respect Hashirama had for him, if he had any at all.

 

_⋯_


	3. Chapter 3

_You ask me what wounded me. I can only say that I came back from a great and terrible war, and that I lost._

Madara wasn’t, contrary to common opinion, invincible. He could get tired. He could be careless.

Sometimes, accidents just happened.

Peace wasn’t declared yet. The battlefield was ebbing to a stop, some massive clash between the Fire and Lightning daimyo that had reeled in five clans. His clan retreated further up the mountains and Madara had been covering the back, giving the younger and the more wounded time to escape, but something happened – a hit, maybe. A slip? He couldn’t recall; all his memories felt muggy and undefined.

He stumbled through the rocks, swiping his sleeve across his wet forehead. The head wound he’d received was bleeding heavily, blood dripping into his eyes, his mouth, and he was exhausted. He’d lost his scabbard somewhere, so he held his naked wakizashi, sweating and losing his grip on the leather hilt.

Madara pushed his damp hair out of his face, breathing hard, and he had to find his clan. He had to protect them, even if the world kept wobbling on its axis like a poorly-spun top. He slapped his hand down on some jagged snags, smearing blood all over them, and wheezed as he turned the bend.

Hashirama was already making a hand seal by the time Madara realized he was looking at someone. He raised his sword briefly, prepared to fight even as his muscles whimpered at the possibility, but Hashirama didn’t finish the seal. Madara could feel his chakra build, stop, and slowly dissipate as he lowered his hands.

“Madara…” Hashirama whispered. “You’re hurt.”

“We’re still in a battle,” Madara reminded him, speaking around a tongue that felt like beef liver. He blinked. “C’mon. I have to leave. Let’s get this over with.”

“You’re barely upright,” Hashirama told him. He didn’t do anything and his brows were drawn together, his mouth pinched close, and Madara didn’t understand it, didn’t understand _him._ They were still enemies. If Madara saw Hashirama this weak, he would have gone for it.

“Hashirama, either fight or get out of my way,” he warned.

“My clan is already leaving,” Hashirama said. He continued to stand there, hand raised unthreateningly. “And so is yours. We’re not really fighting anymore.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard –“

“Madara,” Hashirama spoke again, and there was a new firmness to his voice.  “If we fight now, you will lose.” They were the same age – only sixteen – but he spoke with the authority of grown man. It fit him. Hashirama was going through so many growth spurts that he nearly looked a man, and Madara unthinkingly lowered his blade. His cheeks felt hot.

When nothing else happened, Hashirama approached him. Madara let him come, doing nothing to encourage or dissuade his cautious advancing. When Hashirama was close enough that Madara could see the grooves on his breastplate, he cocked his head a little.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to heal you.” A soft, green glow bloomed across his palm.

And later he would blame it on the exhaustion, on the foreign weight of his sword, but Madara just sighed and let him do as he pleased. A gentle touch… how long had it been since he’d known it? He was hungry for it in a greedy, stupid way, and he trembled when he felt Hashirama kneel down next to him with his warm, healing touch.

The green chakra seeped into his skin and knitted together his flesh. Madara’ mouth was dry. This was the closest they had ever been after what happened – he could smell Hashirama’s sweat, hear his slow breathing. Would he hear his heart too, if he dipped his head down to his chest?

Want bit through him like a gnawing creature. Crazy, insane want, panting inside him like a maddened thing; Madara trembled more, biting his tongue until he tasted blood.

Hashirama probably mistook his reaction for wariness, because he said nothing. And in this space, Madara wanted to cup his cheeks and drink from his mouth. He wanted to drink until he was overfilled, until he was drowning, and he wanted it with a fierce, craving need. But he withheld, clamped tight, and it was pain itself. He was a feral thing, crouched low, caught in the light, and every part of him ached like desire’s bruise.

 _I missed you,_ he wanted to say, on his knees with Hashirama’s breath in his ear. _I thought about you every day. Tell me you missed me too._

 

_⋯_

 

Agony did not change over time. His desires did not change either, though Madara wished they had.

Hashirama’s shoulders were broad now, filled out by slab of hot muscle. His skin sipped the sun and light splashed from him like water. He grew into all his dazzling potential, a man with the endless forest tethered to his soul, and Madara’s insanity clawed deeper into him. He wanted to taste the beat of his pulse. He wanted to learn his body in greedy detail. He wanted to wake up with their legs tangled together and go to sleep with his hair in his face. He wanted a thousand things he could not have, and he knew better than to say them out loud.

The intimacy of brotherhood was not enough. Madara wanted to touch Hashirama in ways brothers didn’t know.

Before, only Tobirama had been his competition. That hadn’t been fine, but it had been survivable, because Madara didn’t want his position.

Uzumaki Mito, however… he wanted what she had.

He wanted it so badly that when he saw her for the first time ever, rage boiled inside him. He could have leapt at her, could have torn into her swan neck and put his hands into her inked chest until he cracked all her rib free. Who she was didn’t matter to him – she was simply the wrong woman in the wrong place. But that was enough. For that, he hated her. He hated her and her clan, hated the red beauty of her hair and the steel in her spine. Maybe in a different world, he could have been her friend. But in this one, she was his rival in something he would never win.

That ate him alive. Her nature was her triumph. Whether it was because she was a woman or because she wasn’t him (and how that filled him with despair), she’d won this war with a nod and a smile.

The wedding came and he wanted to skip it. He would have, if it weren’t for Hashirama’s soft request. _Sit by me,_ he’d said. _You’re family._

For love, he endured. For love, he sat on Hashirama’s right side with Tobirama. A brother.  A friend. The suitor who never was. He said nothing, did nothing, and stared while jealousy gnawed on his flesh. Jealousy was her sitting across him. Jealousy was her white kimono and her downcast eyes, the way she secretly held Hashirama’s hand under their sleeves. Jealousy was sake and blood from his bitten tongue.

Afterwards, he found Hashirama.

“I love you,” he slurred. “I love you so much.” He was drunk, too drunk, and he leaned against Hashirama. He tasted rosebuds.

When Hashirama didn’t push him away, Madara’s heart surged with insane, divine hope. Maybe, he thought, in between hot breaths and clenched teeth, maybe, maybe –!

“You’re drunk,” Hashirama laughed into his hair. His breath also smelled like alcohol. “How are you going to go home?”

 _With you,_ Madara wanted to say. _Come with me. Leave that woman._ It would have been easy to tilt his head up and kiss Hashirama. In this place, no one would see. With one touch, he could pull out his secret and breathe it into Hashirama’s mouth.

In a perfect world, he would have and Hashirama would have kissed him back and he would love him as something other than a friend. But this was not the perfect world.

In this flawed existence, some men loved and other men did not.

Madara didn’t kiss Hashirama. He left the wedding and he left the groom with his bride, and he went home to scream and destroy everything he owned before he slept alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Remember to leave comments! I am a comment-based life form and the more I eat, the faster I write :v My tumblr is sennokami.tumblr.com, I rp and post snips of my writing there for the most part.


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